OFF: The latest tempest over Stonehenge

[Mark Robertson]

Just read about this too at
http://www.newscientist.co.uk/dailynews/news.jsp?id=ns9999310
same stuff just a bit more detail and Avebury too!
Mark
----- Original Message -----
From: "Karen Kusic" <kkusic at EXECPC.COM>
To: <BOC-L at LISTSERV.SPC.EDU>
Sent: Wednesday, January 10, 2001 5:45 PM
Subject: OFF: The latest tempest over Stonehenge


> The latest tempest over Stonehenge
>
> How much of Britain's ancient circle is a 20th-century
> re-creation?
>
> LONDON, Jan. 9 -  Tourists flock from all over the
> world to gaze at Britain's Stonehenge - but the
> famed circle of huge stones is as much the work
> of 20th-century engineers as prehistoric humans.
> Researcher Brian Edwards has uncovered
> photographs showing fallen stones at the site in
> southern England being hauled into place using
> cranes and scaffolding during facelifts over the
> last 100 years.
>
>    NOW THERE IS pressure for official guidebooks to
> be rewritten instead of presenting tourists with the idea that
> the stones have been standing untouched for thousands of
> years.
>    "For too long people have been kept in the dark over
> the Stonehenge restoration work," Edwards, a postgraduate
> research student at the University of the West of England,
> was quoted as saying by British newspapers Tuesday.
>    "What we have been looking at is a 20th-century
> landscape which is reminiscent of what Stonehenge might
> have looked like thousands of years ago," he said. "It has
> been created by the heritage industry and is not the creation
> of prehistoric people."
>    English Heritage, which operates the tourist site, denied
> that there had been any coverup.
>    "What was carried out in the 20th century was
> structural stabilization work. To say that we are trying to
> cover this up in some way is just not true," English Heritage
> spokeswoman Elspeth Henderson told the Independent.
>    "The Stonehenge visitors' guidebook is due to be
> updated, and we will be considering what happened during
> the 20th century, but no decision has been made."
>
>
http://www.msnbc.com/news/513457.asp?bt=nm&btu=http://www.msnbc.com/tools/ne
wstools/d/news_menu.asp
>
> --
> "Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production
> deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid."
> - Frank Zappa